Lecture 19: Romans' Hard Places: The Righteousness of God, All Sinned, the I of Romans 7, and Meeting Corinth

The lecture, section by section

1. The righteousness of God: a standing, not a behavior

   The meaning of the righteousness of God in Romans 1:17 was a focal point of the Reformation itself. In common English, righteous describes ethical conduct, and the Roman Catholic tradition read the term through that Greco-Latin lens; but the Old Testament root idea is conformity to a standard, a legal notion, as righteous weights meet the standard of a true pound, and as Abraham was declared righteous. Three readings of the genitive compete: God's own attribute, his faithfulness to himself; a righteousness from God, a genitive of source; or a righteousness engendered by God in the believer's experience, the Catholic reading in which the catechism makes justification and sanctification one thing. Romans 3:22 decides it: a righteousness of God through faith in Jesus Christ for all who believe is something given to believers, and one cannot give an attribute. It is a forensic verdict, a not-guilty standing declared by the Judge, and on this the recommended commentators stand in unanimity.

2. All sinned: the four positions on Romans 5:12

   Death spread to all men, because all sinned; and the only sin in view is Adam's. Four explanations. Cranfield reads all sinned of individual personal sin, Adam's act the prototype that set the pattern. Luther and Calvin read it of original sin: in Adam all are constituted sinners, and we sin because we are sinners. The seminal headship view holds that all Adam's progeny were in Adam and sinned in and with him, as Hebrews says Levi paid tithes in the loins of Abraham, and as believers were crucified, buried, and raised in Christ. The federal headship view makes Adam the appointed representative whose act counted as ours, the position Essex illustrates from the electoral college: the voter chooses electors who cast the actual vote, and God appointed Adam to cast ours. Federal headship dominated Protestantism into the twentieth century but fits early modern categories better than Paul's; most moderns, Moo included, have moved to the seminal view, and Essex lands there too, noting that the connection to Adam's one act is implicit but contextually inescapable.

3. Sin not imputed where there is no law

   Verse 13 adds a careful distinction: from Adam to Moses sin was in the world, but sin is not imputed when there is no law. Death reigned, proving sin's presence, yet until the law came there was no codification, no statute against which to book the offense. Essex's homely picture: the parent who looks at a child and knows he is guilty but cannot yet say of what. The law's arrival did not create sin; it named it, imputed it to the record, and showed every dying son of Adam exactly which standard he had missed. The verse therefore gives no comfort to the blank-slate theory that one is not a sinner until one sins; all are born in a state of sin, children of wrath by nature, and death from Adam to Moses is the proof.

4. The I of Romans 7: the positions

   From 7:7, Paul speaks in the first person: I was once alive apart from the law, the commandment came, sin revived, and I died; then from verse 14 the tense turns present, what I am doing I do not understand, for I practice the very evil I hate. Who is the I? The autobiographical reading takes 7:7 to 13 as Paul's unregenerate past, the Pharisee whose outward conformity was slain by, you shall not covet, and verses 14 to 25 as Paul's regenerate present, the apostle still at war with indwelling sin; this has been the majority reading from Augustine through Luther and Calvin. Moo argues the tense shift is dramatic, not temporal: the whole passage describes man in Adam, the unregenerate, for the language of being fleshly and sold under sin belongs to chapter 5's old solidarity, not to the man now in the Spirit of chapter 8; a minority view historically, but argued with real cogency.

5. The I of Romans 7: Essex's representative reading

   Essex leans, without dogmatism, to a third way: the representative I. Throughout Romans 1:18 to 8:39 Paul slides between they, you, we, and I, and repeatedly uses the first person as representative, as in chapter 3 where our unrighteousness and my lie speak for the Jew as such, not for the Christian apostle. On this reading the I of Romans 7 is the Jewish man, represented by Paul, who knows the law, and the lesson runs past tense and present: the law exposed our sin, and the Jewish believer who still tries to live his new-covenant life through the law will find it doing now what it has always done, exposing the flesh. The pastoral outcome converges from every position: seek sanctification through the law and it will only display the continuing power of sin; the newness of life comes by the Spirit, as chapter 8 opens. On the litmus-test question, Essex is candid: the righteousness of God is essential ground, but on 5:12 and the I of Romans 7 good and godly men differ without their theology being suspect, and he may learn at the judgment seat that he was wrong.

6. Two questions: Romans 2, and the peace of 5:1

   A student raises Romans 2:5 to 10, a favorite of the New Perspective. Essex reads it in context as aimed at the Jew who glories in possessing the law while breaking it, holding Gentiles to a standard he does not keep; the storing up of wrath describes where that hypocrisy leads, hypothetical only in the sense that the believing Jews addressed are not themselves under it, while the theological ground of judgment, first for the Jew and also for the Greek, stands. A second question takes up the manuscripts at 5:1, we have peace or let us have peace: Essex leans to the indicative, which fits his reading of chapter 5 as still summarizing what God has done for the justified before chapter 6 turns to how the justified live, though he grants, with Moo, that the chapter is transitional on any account.

7. When to preach Romans

   Romans assumes a well-taught audience, by Paul's own testimony, and Essex extends the point to the pulpit. He pleads guilty to preaching Romans as a young graduate, and reports the result: it got him into molasses and the congregation into confusion. His counsel: preach Romans later, after other Pauline letters, a gospel or two, and steady Old Testament teaching have brought pastor and people to where Paul and the Romans were, both well taught and able to admonish one another. Romans will stretch any preacher more than any other Pauline letter; let it stretch a prepared church.

8. Corinth: a Roman city, and a corrected legend

   Thirty percent of Paul's preserved letters went to Corinth, more than to any church he founded, so the Spirit has fixed our eyes there. The city itself corrects the sermon-legend. Greek Corinth, the city of the Peloponnesian War and of Strabo's thousand temple prostitutes, was destroyed by Rome in 146 BC and lay barren a century until Julius Caesar refounded it as a Roman colony: Roman architecture, Roman constitution, and Latin as the official language, so that the proceedings before Gallio were conducted in Latin. The famous verb to Corinthianize describes the old Greek city, not Paul's; in Paul's Corinth the temple of the emperor, not Aphrodite's hill, dominated the center. Which is not to scrub the city clean: such were some of you, Paul writes, listing fornicators, idolaters, the effeminate, homosexuals, thieves, and drunkards. And geography cannot be repealed: the isthmus made the new city the commercial crossroads its predecessor had been, and Essex argues Corinth, a Roman city in the east, prepared Paul for Rome more than any other place could.

9. Why the letters are in Greek

   If Latin was official, why does Paul write the Corinthians, and the Romans, in Greek? Because a letter to a church is not a governmental document. In Corinth, all knew Greek and only some knew Latin; in Rome itself, chapter 16 greets believers drawn from the Greek-speaking east. Essex's analogy: a letter to a broad cross-section of Los Angeles residents, whatever the official language, would be written in the tongue everyone actually shares. Paul writes to friends and congregations in the common language of the eastern empire.

10. Acts 18: I have many people in this city

    Paul's pattern to this point was fixed by opposition: synagogue, a nucleus of believers, expulsion, and departure within two or three months, from Pisidian Antioch through Philippi, Thessalonica, Berea, and an Athens that mostly ignored him. Corinth broke the pattern by divine announcement: the Lord in a night vision commanded, stop being afraid, go on speaking, for I am with you, and no man will attack you to harm you, for I have many people in this city. The mechanics followed the promise, Gallio's ruling giving legal shelter for his year in office, and Paul stayed eighteen months teaching the word, leaving behind the largest church of his ministry so far. The elect of Corinth were known to God before one of them believed.

11. The lost letter, and the tolerated sins

    From Ephesus on the third journey, Paul learned what was happening in Corinth and wrote a letter now lost, known only from his summary in 1 Corinthians 5: I wrote you not to associate with immoral people, not meaning the immoral of this world, since escaping them would mean leaving the world, but any so-called brother who is immoral, covetous, an idolater, a reviler, a drunkard, or a swindler, not even to eat with such a one, a weighty command in a society where whom you dined with declared your fellowship. The principle: judge those within the church, for God judges those outside, and remove the wicked man from among yourselves, in Deuteronomy's words. The Corinthians had misapplied or ignored it, tolerating the man living with his father's wife and brothers hauling one another before pagan courts, arrogant where they should have been ashamed; and correcting that boasting tolerance is where First Corinthians will begin.

1. The Reformation turned in part on whether the righteousness of God is declared or engendered, a standing or an experience. Why does that distinction still matter for how a Christian faces God on a bad day?

2. Essex holds his view of Romans 7 loosely and grants that godly interpreters differ, yet every position converges on the same warning about living by law. What does it look like to hold exegetical positions firmly enough to preach and loosely enough to learn?

3. The Lord had many people in Corinth before one of them believed, and told Paul so to keep him preaching. How should the doctrine of election function as fuel for evangelism rather than an excuse from it?